Fiery stock exchanges

Our bodies are fiery stock exchanges. The gym is a colon, a colony of commerce, with a daily digestive index.

Elizabeth Knox, ‘Going to the gym’, The Love School

I wanted to see if I could write a poem about the gym. How to make such a vacuum of a place visible again?

If you go to a gym, you will know that often when you are there, you think about being elsewhere. The gym is a negative of a place, and the present moment is a void – it’s only ever people thinking about the past and future, above the looping of treadmills and ellipticals, the trickling and evaporating of sweat. I don’t think anyone really wants to go to the gym: they want to have gone to the gym. The point of going is to carry out the transaction then straighten your figurative tie and leave.

At the same time, I’m kind of fascinated by gyms, and I remember vividly every gym I’ve ever been to. The high school gym, of course, but that never really counted – it was massive and cold, really just a wooden floor and a high ceiling with a chewed rope hanging from it. My first “gym” gym, was Bruce’s Fitness Centre in Te Kuiti. What was I doing there? I was thirteen! Still, I would lift weights and go on the rowing machine, willing my arms to become wiry – I would’ve been the size and shape of a solitary green bean at that point – and sometimes I did Step Reebok. Step Reebok was taught by Yvonne, Bruce’s wife. Yvonne was a tall, fleece-suited woman with a swept-back puff of hair, the embodiment of brisk. I wonder what she does now. I liked her. Maybe she’s still there. (I just googled: she is.)

by Michael Carlebach via New York Times

Today the gym has become a Bermuda Triangle in which everything but my physical presence vanishes clean away. I’m a vacancy, a dead maw. For this reason I’m impressed by people who can socialise there. The other day, before a spin class, people were talking about chutney. Not just the flavour combinations they liked, but their experiences of making it. Apple, beetroot, tomato. It was formidable. At the gym I’m limited to smiling, and occasionally, if pressed, saying something about how dark it is in the mornings. But every morning now it’s a little less dark, so in a week or so I’ll change tack to how much lighter it is in the mornings. After that … my God, I don’t know what will happen. At the gym I am pretty much a terrible person.

Anyway, I tried to write a poem about the gym, and now I’m starting to think maybe I’ll do a series of posts about gyms. It may be fruitless. But a place that provokes such reactions – fear and loathing, fanaticism, a variety of boredoms – is worth exploring, I think.

Here’s the poem. Just like at the gym, the less said about it, the better.

Going to the gym (via This isn’t happiness)

The turning

At the gym today there’s a very old lady on a treadmill.
She hangs on to the rails and peers down at her slip-ons
padding along in earnest; they must think
they’re going down to the shops or the garden.

Her movement generates a mild panic
amongst her clothes – they muddle about and cling to each other
a floral shirt peeping
out behind the great tree of her cardigan.

Most days the gym is a lonely place. A human forest.
The high windows hold bars of sunlight.
In the distance people lift things up, put them down in silence.
Sometimes someone calls out, or a weight falls, but mostly
you have to keep to yourself.

Today while I’m stretching, I close my eyes
and when I open them, there’s the face of an old man:
“Oh!” His pixillated eyes, his veins, his nose at close range.
“I thought you must be having a turn.” He places
a shakening hand on my arm. “But you’re all right.”
And he asks me to strap his feet into the stationary bike.
I oblige. His sneaker is light as a bird.
“Not too tight … Jesus not too tight!”
And his knotted knees tremble.
“Not too tight, my lady; I’ll never get out.” He waves me away
and leans into the imaginary wind.

The very old lady on the treadmill has subscriptions
on her mind. She drifts as if down to the letterbox.
Her slip-ons reveal her heels, all splintered bark
but her varicose veins are pretty,
a tangle of forget-me-nots.

Deep into the spooling road, I used to
race myself. I believed I was shedding layers of myself
until only a facsimile of a person was left –
a fine lace of sweat, tailored to a ghost.

Love it, hate it, live it, left it and long for it

London looks like a place that used to be something.

Davy Jones, street photographer

London is propulsion, it rewards those who push forward.

Craig Taylor

This weighty account of London is told by its people: the Londoners. Londoners: The Days and Nights of London Now – As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It and Long for It (Granta, 2011) is the most absorbing, addictive book I’ve read for a pretty long time. It’s a great clamour of voices; each voice cuts straight through the traditional work of history to the quick of human story.

“There’s something about that hour when you don’t encounter a single lucid, sane person. People who are absolutely off their face and have been taken out of the club because it’s dangerous for them to be there, they will just sway. They’ll hold on to the barrier and they’ll sway and they’ll be in their own world, talking to themselves. It’s bizarre. It’s quite gross as well. … all the boundaries and rules that apply in the daytime are gone. And you can’t reason with people like that. People’s worst qualities come out at night.”

Emmajo Read, nightclub door attendant

“There’s this thing you’re supposed to be part of in London. But what is it? That’s the million-dollar question. Everyone’s there because they’re searching, aspiring. A very small percentage is actually living the dream. Ill, tired, unhappy, the rent is fucking loads, what is it you’re getting? The idea of it, or something.”

Jo the Geordie, who stayed in Newcastle

“Most of the doors in Docklands on the expensive flats, they’re basically made of cheese. One kick, and they’ll split in one of two ways: the door hinges will come off the side or they’ll split in half. They’ll say, ‘Somebody’s sawn my door off!’ I’m sorry to tell you this, but no, they haven’t. You have an incredibly cheap door.”

Paul Jones, home security expert

Craig Taylor has interviewed eighty citizens and strangers of London, and the result is an unromantic but seductive portrait of a city. These are often quiet lives: the banker, the bin-diver, the translator, the squatter, the artist, the real estate agent, the manicurist, the cabbie, the lost property attendant. Taylor’s mediation in each story is invisible, so each tale is like a soliloquy. Often Taylor frames an interview with one or two scene-setting details: “In the front room of his house, just off the King’s Road in Chelsea, there are photos of his family on the walls and drawings by his grandchildren on the door.” “He walks into a room in the Hoxton Square Gallery where his work of art, Crapula, stands by itself, surrounded by a few empty plinths.”

Even though these are other people’s stories, Taylor is at the foreground of the book. He’s the investigator, the skilled listener who transcribes and translates the ‘loose talk, asides, grumbles, false history, outright lies, wild exaggerations, declarations, mistakes, strings of anger hung with expletive, affirmations and sometimes revelations – so much that is, really, so little.’ In this way Londoners echoes the work of Studs Terkel and Ronald Blythe, both pioneers of the oral history.

When I finished this book, I felt rather bereft. I am someone who struggles with endings. So I hunted Craig’s details down and got in touch with him. He agreed to answer a few questions about the book.

Craig Taylor

AY: This book must have been a huge undertaking – five years in the making, and around two hundred interviewees whittled down to eighty. Was it difficult to sustain your energy and enthusiasm for the project?

CT: Yes it was.

Thankfully I worked with two excellent editors. Over the years the primary editor, Matt Weiland, took on a number of roles: terrifying task master, sympathetic friend, astute reader, judicious cutter, questioner, nudger, arbiter. ‘No you don’t’ he responded every time I sent him an ‘I need more time’ email. The book would still be a 960,000 word morass if he hadn’t waded in with his famous red pen.

How did you go about selecting people to interview? Did any interviews really not work out?

I made phone calls, emailed people, spoke to people. I tried to be open to what the city offered. Lots of interviews didn’t work out. The failure rate is stratospheric in this kind of work, but what works and what doesn’t often only becomes apparent much later. Of course, some interviews don’t work because the interviewee says ‘Fuck off’ and walks away.

I came across this account by Raymond Lunn (who in the book talks about his experience of being homeless in London when he arrived from Leeds) of an interview with you in a Soho pub a couple of years ago. He seemed quite affected by having the opportunity to tell his story. It made me wonder how other people reacted to being approached for an interview? For some it may have been a strange or exciting experience, to give an account of their lives in London. 

I’m sure there was a broad response. I hope for the interviewees it was a chance to mark this moment in time. I hope someday they’ll reread this book and reflect on their own extraordinary experiences of London. I was lucky to stumble across such incredible lives. They enriched my own.

One of my favourite interviews in the book is with the artist Henry Hudson, who talks about collecting clumps of human hair from the London Underground for one of his artworks. The hairball is this disgusting thing, but it’s also strangely wonderful and hopeful from an artist’s point of view. This paradox recurs in Londoners. There’s the dirt, the crowding, the hostility, but a kind of beauty radiates from it. In your experience, is this a general rule of all cities? Is it something London is particularly good at?

I liked Henry’s project because it reminded me of my own. Walking London, gathering, and hoping the parts would someday form a piece of art. If anyone gets through this book and thinks ‘I’ve just read the literary equivalent of a scavenged hairball head sculpture’, then I’ll know I’ve succeeded. London will always be a combination of beauty and horror; the two have always rested in close proximity, perhaps closer than other cities. The police officer in the book talks about Islington, where wealth and deprivation are often metres apart. I can’t see that changing anytime soon.

As a world centre, London bears a heavy weight: ‘the geography, the architecture, the great mass of London facts and figures, all its history’, as you say in your introduction. But I got the impression that many people you spoke to for this book didn’t necessarily feel that weight. They speak about the everyday, about living their lives in a city that is sometimes uncaring and difficult, sometimes forgiving and kind. And in fact, your approach is to make a distinction between the lives of the people and London’s weight of history and tradition. Why do you think it’s important to make this distinction?

There are enough books on London history. I love Jerry White’s books on London in the last two centuries. I love Mayhew, Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd and many others. I love Rachel Lichtenstein‘s work. I knew this book would have to be different. Thankfully, most people don’t push through London constantly thinking of its history — its a heavy weight to drag when you’re switching from the Victoria to the Northern. They’re thinking of survival. I wanted to speak to people about what they needed to do in London. Some saw their life in the context of history. Some — like one young man — said London history began with him and would end with him. In a way, he’s right.

Your account of life in Brixton in the early 2000s, as a newcomer to London, resonated with me. The pickpockets, the market sellers, the feeling of being pressed up against the windows of the 159 bus. And of course the ‘love, ambivalence and loathing’ when asked how you felt about London. What is your everyday London like these days? 

Much the same. Loving moments often outweigh loathing. I buy fewer phone cards than I did when I first arrived, but I still ride a lot of night buses with steamed windows. I haven’t been pickpocketed in a while, probably because of the sheer success of David Cameron’s Big Society initiative.

(The most depressing interviews were often with people working for vital London charities and social initiatives. After telling me about the work they’d been doing with youth in the area, or trafficked women, or isolated OAPs, they’d say: ‘But all our funding has just been cut.’ London’s going to look very different in the next few years.)

A part of you must have wanted to keep on collecting stories for this book (and there’s a nice quote by Diana Athill on the dust jacket: ‘It’s a wonderful book – I wanted it to be twice as long’) – but obviously London defies all efforts to capture it, just as it’s impossible to define a ‘true Londoner’. How did you know that the project was finished, how did you let it go?

My editor said: ‘You’re out of time.’ I could have kept going. I could have kept going forever and transformed into Joe Gould. (If you don’t know Joe Gould, please read the Joseph Mitchell book.) Diana Athill was kind to say she wanted it to be twice as long, but who would want to inflict that brick of a book on anyone, even a voracious reader like Diana?

Finally, do you have any inklings, yet, of what your next big project might be? (The marvellous Five Dials must be a lot of work in itself.)

Five Dials will continue. My next project is going to be called ‘Sitting In The Library Quietly Reading Books For As Long As I Possibly Can.’ After that, who knows? I’m often told I should head back to Canada so that I can start work on ‘Regina-ers: The Days and Nights of Regina, Saskatchewan, Now — As Told By Some Guy Named Blair At The Tim Hortons Out By The Highway.’

Craig Taylor is the author of Return to Akenfield and One Million Tiny Plays About Britain, which began life as a column in the Guardian. Both have been adapted for the stage. He is the editor of the literary magazine Five Dials. Londoners: The Days and Nights of London Now – As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It and Long for It was published in November 2011.

Born in Edmonton, Alberta, Taylor grew up on Vancouver Island. He now lives in London.

Craig Taylor is on Twitter.

London’s hair is burning

Hair is dead cells. When it’s on you, we all want to touch it, but as soon as it’s off you, in your bed or your shower, it’s suddenly, oooh, horrible. So hair’s a really weird thing. But I think it’s sort of beautiful.

- Henry Hudson (in Londoners by Craig Taylor)

The Rake’s Progress by Henry Hudson via 20 Projects

There’s an artwork by Henry Hudson called Crapula. The centre of the artwork is a large hairball made from human hairs that the artist collected from the London Underground.

I was down in the Tube at King’s Cross, and I felt these gusts of wind and then there it was: the tumbleweed.

The hair tended to collect at the bottoms of stairs, wherever there was a lot of foot traffic. Hudson went round all the different tube stations, mostly King’s Cross from the Hammersmith & City Line, and the Metropolitan and Circle Lines, picking up people’s hair with his Marigold gloves and stuffing it into a Tesco bag or his dinner jacket. He got used to people looking at him edgeways. He made a big ball out of the hair. For a while he didn’t know what to do with it. It sat there in his studio. ’It was impossible, horrible. … I tried putting a comb through it. Impossible. There’s no way.’ Finally Hudson decided to make something out of it. He made a misshapen resin sculpture of his own head and put the hairball inside it. He put a lightbulb inside the hairball. The hairball glowed softly from inside the head, which was tilted slightly as if looking hopefully upwards. Hudson skewered the head on a rusty pole that stood inside a beer barrel. He called it Crapula, meaning, basically, hangover.

I don’t know London as well as I should by now, but I suspect that this artwork captures something of the paradox of it. There is the filth and crap that humans leave behind as they move around the city, and there’s the glumness and self-disgust that you can feel amidst all the excess of London. But something bright emanates from everyone being here. Despite the filth and depression, it’s filled with possibility – a light comes from that, and that light is addictive. We are it; it is us. That’s romance, I guess. Maybe it’s the romance of all big filthy cities. 

Christchurch Road, view from my flat                                                    Brixton Road

When I came to London I was obsessed with the idea of having a London moment. I’d heard people talk about it. I’d probably be standing on a bridge when it happened, or I would be emerging from the tube onto a sunny street. It would be the moment where the city finally unfolded itself to me, like a scene in Heavenly Creatures, and I would know that I belonged and that my streetwise, fully navigational London self had arrived at last. Well, as time has gone on, as I’ve cycled thousands of kilometres and ridden hundreds of buses and visited dozens of tourist landmarks and eaten a goodly share of identical Pret sandwiches, I’ve realised that this won’t happen. 

The moments you have in London are not of insight but of bewilderment and uncertainty, where the vastness of possibility suddenly rears up at you. They are moments of extreme frustration and claustrophobia, of wanting to get out or wanting people to get out of your way. But London doesn’t really give a shit whether you explore the possibilities. It doesn’t care if you leave – though it would probably prefer that you did – because there will always be someone ready to take your place, always another plane about to land and yet others circling above, waiting.

     Ride home, York Road                                                                             Steel drummers outside Iceland

I’ve learnt that when you’re feeling rough in London, London will go out of its way to make you feel rougher. Last week I was waiting at the lights at the intersection of Coldharbour Lane and Atlantic Road. It was Friday morning, it was cold, I had a long ride ahead of me, and I was feeling rough. Up ahead at the meat market, I could see a truck parked with its back doors open and a row of pink carcasses hanging inside. I was determined to cycle past as quickly as possible. The lights changed and we set off. But the swarm of cyclists in front of me wanted to take their time. They were all slow, ALL OF THEM, desperately slow. Some had wicker baskets. I couldn’t get out. I felt the paralysed panic of being trapped in a slowly-rising wave full of jellyfish. I tried to get past so I could get past the carcasses, but because the road is narrow there I was forced to slow to a crawl past the men hoisting out the empty carcasses on their shoulders, pink flesh lolling, hooves jiggling, the smell of meat and gumboots and gutter.

But the very next day I was waiting at the same spot, and an old man cycled up beside me and looked at me and said, “Now THAT is the most pleasant cycling outfit I have ever seen and am likely to see in the future!” So, you’re always being asked to give London another chance.

I think you need to be quite emotionally stable to live well here. You’re always a few steps away from being utterly miserable, or content, or lost. London turns you into a dread-locky teenager: “I HATE MY LIFE!” and then into an old, old soul. It also makes you somewhat toxic. When you blow your nose, black stuff comes out. This could be a metaphor for something but I don’t know what. London also gives you a new awareness of clouds, which seem to lie at the very heart of the buildings in the city. The trick is to view these clouds as benign. Look through them. Clouds are not necessarily ominous, or claustrophobic, or apocalyptic. They’re just the always-clouds of London. And when they’re suddenly not there, the blue sky is wonderfully surreal.

Last Tuesday at around 4am my boyfriend woke me up roaring. He’d somehow dislocated his knee. We strapped up his knee in a towel and duct tape, called a taxi, then shuffled down the stairs. An hour later the taxi came. The driver stood there unmoved, waiting for me to help Matt into the back seat. Off we went in silence. The indifference of the driver was overpowering, a chemical scent. I found myself muttering, “If this was New Zealand, he would’ve, like, asked what was wrong.” The A&E in Camberwell was a grim place. A woman lay in the corner under a pile of coats, making strange whooping noises. A young guy sat with his head in his hands, crying. Whenever a nurse or someone went past, he would try to talk to them – “I’m still bleeding.” Another man was stretched out across chairs, snoring, until some nurses came to fetch him. “HEL-LO,” they bellowed into his face. “HEL-LO,” until the man finally got up to stagger along, unhelped, behind them. It didn’t take long for Matt’s name to be called, and they got him a grimy, rubbery-looking wheelchair.

The knee got put back in place with the aid of a whole lot of laughing gas, and then Matt could walk again and we were ready to go. And that was it. It didn’t cost anything. Although the nurses and doctors had a necessary hardness about them, they had helped Matt and everything had worked out all right. For some reason that crappy old wheelchair has become symbolic to me. Grubby careworn thing that keeps on moving because it’s got to carry so many people.

Ride home, London Eye

Year of the Abandoned Idea

by bisybackson

For me, 2011 has been the Year of the Abandoned Idea. So many have lagged behind and have fallen: ideas for articles, essays, blog posts, poems, emails, and even – tragically – tweets. Only a few ever made it through to the other side, and by then they were virtually unrecognisable. Dazed and weary, coated in sweat and swamp scunge.

This blog post is a burial ground for a few of the ideas that really tried, that really struggled, but just never made it. I have returned to the sites of their downfall and gently carried them here.

• Different kinds of hungers/appetites reimagined as breeds of dog. Great Dane, whippet, dachshund, scraggly sea dog, and so forth.

• Poem about a nightmare I had in which a priest has his head blasted open by a man with an elephant gun. The hole closed up almost immediately, just like in Terminator 2, and the priest shook himself and continued on with his sermon.

• Poem in which I reimagine some people as punctuation marks. (“You were always the apostrophe, / defensive of all possessions, pushing them before you / like a supermarket trolley.”)

• In Search of the Peanut Butter Machine (that used to be in residence at Whanganui New World).

• Poem about a world in which similes do not exist, and what happens as the poets gradually lose their minds.

by bisybacson

• An expository on my life of tea, which opens: “I’m disappointed with London’s tea scene. Of all the places in the world, I’d thought that this one would be the most accommodating to my needs.” (Possibly include anecdote about bringing in my own special tea to work, and how people commented that this was very strange, and how the next day the special tea was GONE. People actually couldn’t bear to look at it.)

• A poem that half-rhymes ‘crumpet’ with ‘armpit’. As far as I know no one has done this yet.

• Brain Shocks: a day-by-day account about going off anti-depressants; the piece concludes with an assertion of which reality is the truer one.

• Something about the tiny, aggressively-panting runner I used to pass each early morning in Mt. Cook, usually in the dark. She was the size and stature of a wild, wiry goat and her morning run seemed driven by despair. What was she like when she just walked? What was she like when she sat down with a cup of tea?

• Blog post about getting eyelashes stuck in my eye. (“Usually a lost eyelash works its way out as I sleep. Or it works its way to the back of my eyeball, swimming upwards like a fish into my brain.”) Possibly could be shortened to an orphan tweet, at the relevant moment.

• Essay about the history of the flaming skull image. I’ve always thought that if I ever have a book, I’d like it to have a flaming skull on the cover. I’m not saying this for shock value. I would really, honestly like this.

• A series of “An Afternoon with …” poems about EVERYONE I HAVE EVER MET.  Make a book called Afternoons and launch it with an afternoon tea party – inviting all of the people in the book – then try to write a poem about the afternoon tea. (So far I’ve written about afternoons with Jane, Simon, Matthew, and high-school teachers, but there are many hundreds to go.)

• An essay about the history of the headbutt.

• A poem called “Desire”. (“Don’t look directly at it / unless you’re wearing the special glasses.”)

• Something about a friend of mine who has several mind-altering phobias: capsicum seeds (too much like ovaries, which should stay internal, always), sleeping people (they make her feel very awake and very, very alone; there is no point going on when people are sleeping, it feels like they have given in, they have betrayed her), peach skin (the faint squeak of fur against teeth, as if one is eating a small animal), shiny shoes (no person should be able to see himself in his shoes), and unmediated banana (a banana should never ever be eaten unmediated, with the discarded skin close by like a rubber glove at the scene of a crime; bananas are only okay if they are IN things – muffins, cakes, desserts – where the fact that they have come out of a PEEL is disguised).

Amy Wilton, via Guardian

• An interview with Kevin McCloud, because he just seems like such a lovely guy.

• An interview with Pic Picot, maker of Pic’s Really Good Peanut Butter which comes in “an amazingly returnable jar” with a poem by the retiring, otherwise-unpublished poet Bill Smith under every label.

• An interview with the long-haired guy who sells The Big Issue on Shaftesbury Avenue. He wears a leather waistcoat with ‘Jesus Loves You’ on it and wishes every single passerby a good morning. He never seems to tire.

• An interview with one of my heroes, the cartoonist Tom Gauld.

• An interview with Tom Hodgkinson, co-founder of the Idler Academy.

• An interview with my boss. I’ve never been so confused.

The Nefeljcs Project at Budapest, via Colossal

The orange cone

Savage Eyes

On Wednesday after work I got on my bike and rode home. At an intersection on Brixton Road I pulled up behind a big red bus. It was dark, and I could see parts of my reflection in the bus. I have two white lights on the front of my bike; one light is flashing and the other is steady. I saw the reflection of the two lights. The lights looked like eyes in a face, looking straight into me, half-glaring, half winking. I saw that face as the face of death.

I was going to write about the joys of a newly serviced bike, but there’s only so far you can go with that. It’s not ever-present. Not like death is. Lately, the thing I’ve been thinking about a lot is getting killed while riding my bike.

In Wellington, I used to imagine picturesque, almost delicate deaths. I died by being blown by the wind into the harbour, or my brakes failed when I went down an 80-degree-angled hill. My imagined deaths are very different over here. In a roundabout snarling with buses and cabs, I find myself encircled by alternate universes in which I’m getting killed in all sorts of ways. Suddenly a lorry is whoomping overheard, or I’m being squeezed to death between buses, or the shape of my body is imprinted on the flung-open door of a car. I’m not sure if I’m really afraid. I think it’s that I have become habitually alert to the fact of possible death. The alertness has become this hyperactive caution. What might happen has become too vivid.

This year, as of Friday 2 December, sixteen cyclists have been killed in London, one on the road where I work. I have passed a couple of crash sites: the telltale sign of an ambulance and a discarded bicycle with an orange cone next to it. The orange cone.

One day a few weeks ago, my bike was at the mechanic, so I walked down to the tube. I was actually looking forward to taking the tube; it would be nice to sit down and read the paper, and just be motionless, not thinking of death. The tube is great for looking at things, too, like people’s shoes, and the books they’re reading. But there were severe delays that morning. (When delays become “severe” they basically become living beings.) We were sitting in the carriage for ages, not moving. Then the announcement came: “There is a body on the tracks.”

Everyone in the carriage groaned.

My brother Neil calls this “the existential groan”.

Death in the underground is tragic and horrible, and what makes it even more tragic and horrible is that it’s so routine. One can use it as a legitimate excuse for being late to work, and this excuse will be shrugged off by one’s boss. I wonder if the fact that death is so routine, often so banal, makes it hard for us to be constructively aware of it. By constructive, I mean an awareness that compels us to live more fully. I just realised it’s not really possible to write this without referencing Steve Jobs’s 2005 Stanford Commencement Address.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.

Illustration by Eddy Dukkers via 50 Watts

What I’ve been experiencing is not constructive, but a hyper-awareness of death. This is like a thin gauze of morbidity over my eyes. Traffic lights in disrepair have bags thrown over their heads, tied around their necks. The un-greased chains of advancing cyclists squeak like rats. Each bus is the gaping maw of death.

Yesterday I was talking about this with my brother Neil, also a keen cyclist. He described being run off the road by a speeding car whose driver was talking on a phone. “I heard myself let out this bellow of utter fear,” he said, “and I realised it was the death fear.”

I was going take some field recordings of the bellows of death fear, but I felt that it might distract from the purpose of this post, and maybe also be off-putting to would-be cyclists.

So, I need to relearn how to momentarily suspend my belief in death. Most of us do this automatically. Why else would we travel in cabooses 200 feet underground, practically in moving graves? Why else would we leave our houses?

The accepted wisdom for London cyclists is to ride like everybody’s trying to kill you. (As Homer says, peering into Bart’s face: ”People die all the time, just like that. Why, you could wake up dead tomorrow! … Well, good night.”) I’m all for defensive cycling. But I’m not sure that the they’re-trying-to-kill-you philosophy will help you feel good about being alive. We soon become pickled in our own rancid fear and loathing. It’s not easy to break out of this mindset. As cyclists we are more present in the ‘fearscape’ of the city than drivers, as this brainy article Fear of Cycling by Lancaster cyclist Dave Horton has it:

The city is full of fear, which is partly why and partly because people move in cars. Increasing car use can be seen as a retreat from the ‘public’ world of the city, a means of cocooning oneself and one’s family from ‘the outside’, from fear of traffic but also from dangerous places and people. Cycling puts the person back into this fearscape in a much less mediated way.

One strategy I’ve been trying out when I ride, purely to quell my morbid imaginings, is to construct an imaginary cocoon of safety. I do this by thinking of cars and buses as my friends. I’m like a suckerfish on the backs of the big friendly giants of the sea: the whales and dolphins. (Bear with me here.) I came up with this when I had the realisation, while riding alongside a bus, that the bus was shielding me from other traffic. It was also stopping pedestrians from walking out in front of me, because pedestrians are much more likely to wait for a bus than they are for a bike.

This strategy completely upends my usual way of thinking about traffic. It is clearly counter-intuitive, possibly foolish. But it momentarily calms my hyperawareness of death and puts me back in the landscape as opposed to the fearscape.

Sometimes, when a car is cruising along beside me, I think how much like old friends we are – just rolling along together, two benign species. At the end of the road, well, we’re both glad to be at the end of the road. We park our bikes or our cars and go into our houses and have dinner.

Libération by Jean-François Martin

I guess there was a sense of inevitability about it

Astronomers are greatly disappointed when, having traveled halfway around the world to see an eclipse, clouds prevent a sight of it; and yet a sense of relief accompanies the disappointment.
Simon Newcomb

Jean-François Martin, Le Monde des livres (‘The world of books’)

A good friend of mine recently applied for a prestigious writing course at a university. He’s had some things published, won some prizes, and done a couple of courses already. I was convinced that all of that was leading him to this fantastic moment of acceptance. They’d come around to his house with a marching band and lift him onto their shoulders and parade him through the streets (of the national literary consciousness). And then a year of digestive-biscuit-and-tea-fuelled workshopping would commence, after which he would basically blast through the roof (of the national literary consciousness) like Grandma in George’s Marvellous Medicine.

“I guess there was a sense of inevitability about it,” he said later. You can feel it already, can’t you. He DIDN’T GET IN.

It’s not like he’s died. But something has died.

“This must be how All Blacks supporters feel when they don’t win the World Cup,” he said. “Things are pretty damn low just now.” (He then segued, bleakly, into the outcome of the recent New Zealand election: “These are dark days indeed, and the future looks darker yet.” This interpretation – which many people I know would say is a fair observation in itself – was clearly an echo of his feelings at being rejected from the course. His happiness had hinged upon that result, and now a future wholly unwished-for must be comprehended.)

Yet being rejected is what writers do. At first, it’s a bit like getting dead-legged. The pain! but also the numbness. Until finally you can’t feel your leg any more. Your leg is so dead that you learn how to carry on walking with the dead leg just trailing along. You learn to keep in the back of your mind, at all times, that one day you’ll be able to tell the story of these rejections, and people will laugh with you about those crazy old unenlightened days. You will be a hero. You can look forward to the sweet moment of breakthrough that will give your suffering its inner richness.

Being rejected as a writer also helps you to gather an extensive repository of self-reassurances.

• I’ve told the truth, and they think their readers don’t want to hear it.
• They don’t know what shelf it would go on in the bookshop, or what category it would go under on Kindle, or whatever.
• I can make an artwork and/or wallpaper of my rejection slips, like that guy.

I’ve noticed a phenomenon to do with rejection letters. Apparently people want to hear about them – the crueller the better – especially when canonical authors are implicated. Is this the literary equivalent of celebrities with cellulite? There are many, many online articles – and lots of them seem to be cobbled together from other online articles – about legendary writers who were serially rejected. You can read quotes from rejection letters to writers like Faulkner (“Good God, I can’t publish this!”), Orwell (“It is impossible to sell animal stories in the USA”), Nabokov (“I recommend that this be buried under a stone for a thousand years”). You can go to the Rejection Wiki to see the form rejections that many literary journals send out, or visit that blog Literary Rejections On Display (good idea, but to my mind poorly executed). You can buy a book that celebrates rejection (The Rejection Collection by New Yorker cartoonist Diffee Matthew, or that one compiled by the guy who compiled Other People’s Love Letters – oh yeah, Other People’s Rejection Letters). Letters Of Note also does a very nice line in famous people’s rejection letters.

I guess we’re meant to feel better after reading all this. We can now say with certainty that it’s not just us: the world is a cold bastard. To be alive is to be disappointed. We have a more nuanced view of the names on people’s bookshelves (and successful people in general). It isn’t easy to gain acceptance, and in this we have things in common with Nabokov.

But what else can we take from the knowledge of all this rejection? I wonder if it’s anything more than: “Look how repeatedly and/or cruelly so-and-so was scorned, and how that person’s refusal to give up and/or sheer good luck all paid off in the end because they went on to change the world.” It’s the same old drum – some might call it a dead horse – that has led the empire of Chicken Soup for the Soul to its best-selling, bloated state.

Rejection might be universal but I don’t think there’s a universal message to take from it. It’s an experience particular to the individual. That’s what makes it universal. Which isn’t to say that we shouldn’t share our rejections. We should if we want. We should commiserate with one another and suggest useful defense mechanisms. We should buy each other beer and kebabs to be enjoyed in stoic silence.

Unfortunately, for my friend, whose writing I admire, being rejected from a creative writing course carries much deeper implications than rejection from a literary journal, magazine, publishing house, or competition. Rather than not fulfilling the possibly narrow criteria of one of those outlets, there seems to be a larger judgement here about his value and potential as a writer. He proposed that one reason could simply be that he doesn’t have enough demons, and wondered if he should acquire some.

Sarah Laing, New Wave

But he also feels that maybe, he just doesn’t fit the “good writing model”. His voice and his subject matter don’t tick the boxes. Something’s “going on”.

How do you argue with that creeping sense of alienation? These were my feeble commiserations.

• A course in creative writing is only one possible entry point into a writing career. For many people it’s the exit. It provides no certainty.
• You can write the book you’ve planned to write, course or no course. Nobody can stop you from writing and reading.
• It might’ve been the tiniest thing, the smallest glitch, that tipped your fate. In time, with practise, that thing will fade into oblivion.
• It might’ve been the biggest problem, the most fundamental obfuscation, that tipped your fate. In time, with practise, this thing will evolve into a compelling feature of your work, and the reason that it is compelling is because it should be wrong. [See rejection note to Ursula K. Le Guin: The book is so endlessly complicated by details of reference and information, the interim legends become so much of a nuisance despite their relevance, that the very action of the story seems to be to become hopelessly bogged down and the book, eventually, unreadable.]
• Or, just, there might’ve been tons of unusually great applicants this year.

I feel an urgent need to rescue my friend from bitterness. Because, first: even though bitter writers can be great writers, the shame is that they’re more often remembered for their misanthropy. (Bukowksi: “I do not like the human race. I don’t like their heads. I don’t like their faces. I don’t like their feet. I don’t like their conversations. I don’t like their hairdos. I don’t like their automobiles. I don’t like their dogs or their cats or their roses.”)

Second, I fear that the belief that there’s some kind of coterie – controlling everything from the inside out, high-fiving the privileged few and snobbing the rest – is ultimately very destructive for a writer. Even if it is true we should make every effort to not believe it. Instead we should imagine that the people who make the decisions are just readers. Maybe they’re looking for stories that light them up in some way. Maybe they’re trying to anticipate what other readers will see there. (It’s not necessary to say that in ten, twenty, thirty, forty years’ time I may well think differently about the business of acceptance and rejection.) It’s possible that they are.

Jean-François Martin, Les bananes

You Shook Me

The siren waits thee, singing song for song.

- Walter Savage Landor

from Robert T. Beyer, Sounds of Our Times: Two Hundred Years of Acoustics (1998). The first siren, invented in the late eighteenth century, was more of a musical instrument – it had a stopcock that opened and closed a pneumatic tube, and this powered the pipes in a church organ. A later, improved siren was able to be heard underwater. So it was officially named the siren, as an echo to the mythological Sirens of the sea.

My brother and I used to make sport of jumping out at my dad, who was brilliantly scare-able. His face would shake, his arms would flail, he would leap what seemed like metres into the air as if by jet propulsion. Our last but most triumphant scare was to creep up behind him as he sat at the computer and explode a fully inflated rubber Whoopie Cushion behind his head. He leaped off the chair, gasping. We whirled back, bracing ourselves. Then he let out a terrible roar. “DON’T DO THAT.” We fell silent and fled down the hallway. Our scaring days were over.

You can tell a lot about a person by the way they react to loud noises. I still think of my dad-scaring as revelatory moments of my childhood – they revealed an aspect of my dad I’d never seen before and hadn’t known he was capable of: pure rage. Likewise, my mother – Led Zeppelin’s ‘Your Time is Gonna Come’ played on the stereo too loud would so often have her shrieking from the garden that to this day I can’t hear that song without also hearing her voice, the phantom far-away cries of ‘Turn it down.‘

Every Friday at precisely 2:30pm, the fire alarm in the building where I work howls into life. It wails for thirty long seconds. This is a heavy-duty wail. The alarm seems to be situated right above my head. I can feel the sound throbbing in my internal organs. One or two people in the office find the alarm very funny. Others get angry. “Why do they have to do this every week? It is ridiculous.” But most of my coworkers don’t seem to hear it. They continue staring at their screens and calmly sipping tea.

Urban Fox III by Rachel Levitas

For some people hearing a siren is just like passing another face in the street. They’ve adapted to the city to the degree that sirens barely register on their audio landscape. Not me. I’ve devolved, and find sirens genuinely distressing. The only siren you heard with any regularity in Te Kuiti was the daily five o’clock siren from the fire station to mark the end of the working day, back then. It was a deep-throated soughing which set all the dogs in town howling, and which I now think of with sepia-toned nostalgia. But London is a siren city, and the sirens here are not only much louder than back in New Zealand but they’re also higher pitched, providing a more authentic representation of emergency: this sound says EVERYTHING IS OUT OF CONTROL. It’s the sound that occurs before the death rattle, a kind of death warble. When I hear one at close range, always an ambulance or police car or fire truck on my cycle commute in the morning or night, my defenses are blasted away, just as my brother and I cruelly obliterated my father’s defenses those years ago. My instinct is to drop my bike and drop to the ground, a hi-vis huddle.

Obviously this is not the way it works: it’s not really the point to think about sirens in terms of how they affect the lives of healthy passersby. The purpose of the siren is to remind us that someone, somewhere, is in a life-or-death situation and you can help by getting out of the way; or they are there to tell us that things are about to get a whole lot worse, as in the case of disaster sirens. I came across this 1980 clip that was produced to tell Londoners what warning sounds they should expect in the event of a raid on the city. The network of sirens was installed before World War II.

Most sirens mimic the sound of a person wailing, surely to tap into something primal within us that responds to another being’s distress. I’m always quite humbled by how quickly people pull over or shuffle their bikes into the gutter to let the vehicle pass. For a brief moment we’re united in our mission to create a safe path for someone else. These are the times when I feel, weirdly, the most connected with fellow road users. As the crying fades out, the pitch dropping off-key into the distance, the traffic ramps up and the ordinary honking, heckling, cutting-up routine resumes.

A couple of weeks ago I went to see a chiropractor. He has one of those door buzzers that is very loud and abrasive. While he was going over my bones, muttering things like “C1, L1, S5″ (I’m told these are the names of the individual cervical vertebrae) the buzzer blasted out again. I decided to say something about it, because I don’t have a very easy relationship with this chiropractor, and thought it would be possible to bond with him over this noise. So I exclaimed, “Wow, that noise must take ten years off your life every time.”

He stared at me blankly. “Well, maybe it would,” he intoned, “if I was the kind of person who thought about things that way.”

This bothered me. I’m still not quite sure why. Granted, telling someone they should technically be dead by now because of their door buzzer wasn’t a great way of breaking the ice. But it seemed such a joyless way of responding, so closed off to all possibility. It was as if he was saying, My reaction to that noise defines the kind of person I am. And that he believed he was clearly more self-possessed, more healthy of mind, than I was. I would love to give him a really massive fright sometime – maybe dress up in one of those chiropractic skeletons he has hanging around the room, and leap out from behind the door when he comes in. But I suspect that, like a cyborg, he is un-scareable.

As the population rises and the traffic thickens, I guess emergency sirens will only get louder and more high-pitched, or maybe audio engineers will need to develop new, more frightening sirens to keep the jaded and desensitised public alert. Or maybe a siren so hypnotically beautiful that people stand still in the street to listen to it, mesmerised, as the emergency vehicle tears through.

Some interesting sirens (via the wonderful London Sound Survey, dedicated to preserving the sounds of the street)

This siren at a maximum security hospital in Berkshire is tested every Monday morning. It starts off like a Radiohead song, then it’s like a wheezing accordion.

This burglar alarm in Brixton for some reason reminds me of a turkey.

This is my favourite siren: the Coryton oil refinery in Essex. It sounds at 25-second intervals – an eerie, bird-like scree across the sea. You can hear gas flares, birds, and insects.

Here is a a mounted police whistle in the Mall, London. The police officer is trying to clear pedestrians out of the way so a marching band can go through.

Read a poem I wrote called ‘Giving My Father Frights’